Can Instagram Own Fashion Week?
This week, Instagram’s top fashion liaison Eva Chen released a playbook for staging digital fashion shows on the platform, signalling the beginning of the end for a one-size-fits-all approach to fashion week.
On Wednesday, Instagram’s Vice President of Fashion Partnerships Eva Chen released a 13-page "playbook" on how to stage a virtual fashion show on the platform, covering practical pointers on topics from sending invitations to harnessing influencers to recreating backstage interviews.
Social distancing measures and travel bans aimed at slowing the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic have forced the cancellation of traditional fashion shows for the foreseeable future, presenting a land grab opportunity for popular digital platforms like Instagram.
YouTube is also a contender. Its own fashion liaison Derek Blasberg recently worked with Carine Roitfeld to reimagine her annual AmfAR charity show as a virtual event. Then, there’s the fast-growing video-sharing app TikTok, which is hot with teenagers and tweens.
But Instagram is best positioned to seize the opportunity. The platform has long been a favourite of industry insiders and fashion fans alike. And for many brands, whose runway shows now double as consumer marketing spectacles, Instagram engagement is already a critical success metric and shows are often conceived with elaborate sets and performance elements that function as Insta-bait for influencers.
Now, lockdowns have pushed millions of consumers to embrace live video as a next-best alternative to real-life interaction, driving a 70-percent spike in usage of Instagram’s "Live" functionality in April. The platform is said to be testing a new ‘Simulcast to Facebook’ feature that would allow users to reach even larger audiences. And, this week, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, announced new shopping features, meaning shows staged on the platform could have a better chance of driving sales.
Instagram is certainly a compelling option for brands mulling how and where to stage virtual fashion shows this season. And yet, fashion councils in London, Paris and Milan, which organise some of the world’s most important fashion weeks, are building their own destinations to host digital fashion weeks in June and July, targeting consumers as well as industry professionals, and putting themselves in competition with the likes of Instagram.
How will they drive significant traffic to these destinations? Will influencers and journalists find them compelling enough to amplify? And if you were a brand, wouldn’t you rather use a platform with a proven user experience where large numbers of people already gather?
It’s not hard to imagine Instagram disrupting these platforms, along with the very notion of holding digital fashion weeks in the first place.
Traditional fashion weeks exist because the physical world is frictionful. When people must travel to another country to attend a fashion show, it’s logical to bundle brands together and hold shows at a particular place and time to minimise friction and maximise engagement.
But the internet is different. Just as e-commerce has unbundled department stores, eliminating the need to buy everything under one roof when a universe of specialist retailers is only one click away, platforms like Instagram reduce the need for digital fashion weeks that aggregate brands together at one time and place, allowing innovation to flourish by making it easier for designers to show their collections whenever, wherever and however they want.
Of course, the pandemic won’t cancel physical fashion shows forever. Fashion weeks have an important role to play in bringing the industry together. And digital events are likely to prove poor substitutes for the magic of traditional shows, which powerfully harness the physical presence of the "right" people — celebrities, influencers and other tastemakers — to get fashion’s dream machine whirring, turning dresses into objects of desire.
Importantly, Instagram does not see the app as a substitute for physical fashion shows. “In no way do we see Instagram as a replacement for the traditional show, but we want to do what we can to provide a solution during these times, and we hope this is a good place to start,” reads its playbook.
But when physical events do return and fashion weeks with them, brands are unlikely to revert back to a one-size-fits-all approach to showing. It’s easy to imagine a designer like Virgil Abloh staging a fashion analogue to Travis Scott’s virtual concert in the battle royale video game Fortnite, which attracted 12.3 million concurrent players, for his next Louis Vuitton men’s show. Why would he return to a traditional catwalk template when the pandemic passes?
It’s doubtful that Instagram will ever own or disrupt fashion week in its entirety. But a season or two of brands showing on its platform and exploring new possibilities for how and when to present their collections could certainly rewire the way fashion week works.